Sunday, November 29, 2009

For more than three years I have been an avid and fervent user of the Opera browser. I liked its speed, the speeddial, butttons and mouse-gestures.However, the high CPU and memory use resulting (or so I understand) from an incomplete compatibility with Adobe Flash, have always been a concern. Of late with Opera 10+, my experience, particularly on my EeePC901, this high CPU problem has become even more serious and leads to frequent periods of non-responsiveness on the computer.So, I started to look at Google Chrome on both the EeePC 901 and on my new MacBook 6,1. There really is a lot to like particularly the speed which is at least as good as that of Opera.Although Chrome uses a version of speeddial, for me it's not as convenient as that of Opera. I don't like the fact that the user has no direct control over what pages show up in the speeddial nor on how many pages can be represented.Another feature of Chrome that I don't like is that Open Link in New Tab does not jump immediately to the new tab. On the Mac, Chrome extensions do not work. However, in the development version of Chrome for Mac (available here), known as Chromium, a limited number of extensions are indeed available.I installed the five recommended here which included Dots, Aviary, Chrowety and Feedly.Unfortunately, although all seemed to install fine, they are not reliable. Dots, feedly and chrowety all worked only occasionally and very frequently resisted all attempts to open by clicking the icons that appeared in the bookmark bar.Nevertheless, I really don't believe I needed any of them so my view of Chrome has not changed because of this.In summary, reluctant as I am to relinquish my long association with Opera, I am very impressed with Chrome. If only they could make the speeddial more like that of Opera and jump to new tabs after clicking Open Link in New Tab.

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What's that picture?

This is the Praça de Estação (Station Park) near the center of Belo Horizonte, MG in Brazil where I live. This area which includes a metro station was recently cleaned up and refurbished and has become one of the picture postcard areas of a city that is truly finding its identity. Read more about Belo Horizonte.